


The Light-Years

by Anonymous



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Malex, Post season finale, extremely dubious physics and metaphysics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 10:03:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19060417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: i would change for you but babe that doesn't mean i'm gonna be a better manwhat happens afteri love you.Michael starts picking up transmissions from another galaxy.





	The Light-Years

**Author's Note:**

> This is a strange one. Were it not for some fortuitously-timed encouragement from our wonderful @bisexualalienblast, I probably would have binned it. 
> 
> List of the sundry sources I've ripped off comes at the end.

Why did anyone think it would be easy?

Sure, he was in love. Limitless undying love which shined around him like a million suns and fuck the Beatles for providing him with the kind of overblown metaphors that leapt too readily to mind these days. He was in love. But for ten long years love had done his heart no favors when it taught him to crawl over blasted glass and fill his emptiness with broken things. Twenty-eight was too old to be young again, so why did people expect love to make him replete?

His new life was hammered out along the exposed, unforgiving lines of a brutalist architecture. Up a lover, down a brother. Friends and family, distinctly articulated and grouped together in a unified whole. Him and Alex, the raw and unpretentious honesty of their two-in-oneness.  

There was nothing easy about it.

 

*

 

Michael had been cooling his heels in the cage for less than an hour when the door banged open and Kyle Valenti burst through. “Seriously, Guerin?” he demanded. “I thought you were better than this. Who’s had you locked up now? If it was DeLuca, well, can’t say I blame her—”

“Nobody locked me up,” Michael interrupted. He was poised at the tipping point of inebriation: if he finished the tequila shoved down the back of his jeans, he’d be drunk; if he left it alone and pulled himself together, he’d sober up fast. Alien metabolism and all.

“I’m sorry, _what_?”

“Is it so hard to believe I’m here of my own free will?” he wanted to know.

“Free will is generally checked at the door when you’re in jail, Guerin,” Valenti said.

“I’m free as a bird, doc.” Michael stretched, letting his head tip back against the cement wall. The drunk tank was directly below an AC vent, and he relished the goose bumps springing up across his skin. His sweat-soaked t-shirt was damp and clammy now. “And even if I wasn’t, I could just—how’d you put it?—oh, yeah, _Magneto my way through_.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?”

“My mom runs this place, did you forget? I stopped by to see her and one of the uniforms said you were in the tank. What are you doing, Guerin?”

“Weeeell…” he made himself more comfortable on the bench. “Me and my buddy José were walking down the street, and I’m thinking it’s a hundred and twenty fucking degrees out here and I haven’t put my sunscreen on today. So I wonder where I can grab some cold air and I remember, boom! my friendly neighborhood police station has a backup generator. So I’m taking advantage of the hospitality.” Coming to a decision, he extricated the bottle of tequila, untwisted the cap, and took a long pull. José went down nice and smooth, like he always did.

“This isn’t who you are anymore,” Valenti said, like he had any fucking clue who Michael was. “You’re above—or you need to start _rising above_ —this drunk and disorderly shit.”

“Above?” Michael scoffed and took another swig. “Lemme tell you, man, I used to get wasted and push 85, 90 out on Route 380. Uh-huh, that’s right. Can’t tell you how many DUIs I dodged ’cause the arresting officer liked sucking my cock.” He grinned up at Valenti, showing all his teeth. “So I don’t look down, know what I’m saying?”

Valenti blanched slightly, and Michael felt like he’d won. But then the bastard swung low: “Don’t you think,” he said, “that after ten years of all that star-crossed lovers stuff, Alex deserves better?”

_He’s right, you know_ , said the voice in his head. _Alex has always deserved better._ Then a tidal wave of tequila-laced anger crashed over him. “You have no right,” he said, and his voice was actually shaking with suppressed fury, “no _fucking_ right to throw that in my face—I don’t care _what_ Liz—Maria—it’s none of your business, what I—what Alex—you know what, just—fuck you, Valenti. _Fuck you._ ”

“I-I…” Valenti stuttered. He rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry, Guerin.”

Michael wasn’t ready to back down so easily. “ _Prick_ ,” he said emphatically, and spat through the bars.

“Be that as it may,” Valenti continued like he hadn’t heard him, “Alex is my friend. I’m concerned—”

“The way I see it, you lost your right to be concerned ten years ago—”

“Michael. You need to watch the drinking.” It was the use of his first name as much as anything else that knocked him off-balance. “And I’m not saying that as the asshole who treated Alex—and you—like shit in high school. I’m saying it as a doctor and as your friend.”

Michael gaped at him. Valenti stared right back, and as hard as Michael tried, he couldn’t discern any trace of superciliousness in his expression. Valenti wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know, of course. He and Alex argued over it, but there was a lot of denial going around. _This is textbook PTSD, Alex._ Bad move. _Michael, you’re an alcoholic._ Whatever. As for Valenti, he’d cast snide aspersions in Michael’s direction before. But this cool, clinical pronouncement stung a lot worse than his usual holier-than-Michael act.

“I know you’re going spare over your brother,” Valenti was saying. “Liz is too, trying to find a way to bring him back, but…”

“But what?” His voice came out flat and dull. He didn’t even bother to rebut Valenti’s assertion that they were _friends._

“I’ve been studying the autopsy reports of the aliens who died in the ’47 crash, and whatever superpowers you guys have, it doesn’t look like your livers are any more robust than the average human’s.”

A startled bark of laughter escaped him. “You sure about that?”

“No, but—”

Michael passed him the bottle of tequila through the bars. “Go on, doc,” he said. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, Valenti looked exhausted, the skin under his eyes purple and bruised. “You could probably use it, huh? How’s things with the new sister?”

 

*

 

Valenti offered him a lift back to the cabin, but Michael asked to be dropped at Sanders’ instead. He waited for Valenti’s car to disappear down the dusty road before he moved the airstream with his mind and clambered down to his bunker. It was pleasantly cool underground. The whir of the fans, the hum of the computers soothed his frayed nerves. He reached for an open bottle of acetone sitting on the lab table, but with Valenti’s blunt caution echoing in his mind— _Michael. You need to watch the drinking_ —he limited himself to a sip.

The ship consul lay dormant under its dropcloth covering. It had lain there for a while now, ever since he and Alex had “settled,” or whatever it was they had done and become. Labels didn’t sit easily with either of them. Ten years ago Michael might have tripped over himself to call Alex his boyfriend. But after an avalanche of disruptions set off by the return of the two prodigals—Liz, and Alex himself—and the ruptures and revelations and shattering, shattering losses…

Well. None of the old words seemed to have any meaning left.

So they just _were_. Because they were in love. Two-in-one.

It did Michael’s head in a little.

Carefully, he folded the dropcloth back and lost himself in the glittering whorls of the alien glass. It responded to his touch, rich pinks and purples gathering around his hand. Something tickled at the edge of his consciousness: a faint magnetic pull, a thin archaic voice calling out to him. For a while now he had wondered what would happen if he tried to merge his consciousness with the consul; was that how his people had piloted their ship? But it was still missing a piece, or possibly several. Reluctantly, he took his hand off the glass and covered it again. He wasn’t trying to leave the planet anymore—as much as he resented it, with its useless human population, its rising temperatures and vanishing landmasses and batshit crazy weather. Earth meant Alex, so he was trying to make his peace with this stupid blue planet.

_Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…_

He was jolted out of his reverie by one of the computers. The screen flashed to life and it beeped at him, insistent as an alarm clock. He ambled over. It was some kind of pop-up, nothing but a long string of numbers: 96,688,365,498,721. He frowned at it; he’d set up all kinds of anti-spyware and malware protection so his activities would go undetected by, well, the government and Jesse Manes and anyone else who might be looking. He closed out the window.

Then, maybe fifteen seconds later, another pop-up, another round of frantic beeping from the computer: 96,688,365,498,720.

_What the hell?_ He couldn’t make any sense of it, except this number was one less than the previous, and it would take a long-ass time to reach zero if he sat around waiting for it. So he decided to ask Alex about it later, if he remembered; maybe Alex could sort out whatever had bugged up the system.

He reemerged into the sunlight a few minutes later and shifted the airstream back into place. He still slept there occasionally, when the chaos got too loud and the only company he could handle was stars and sand. But, for all intents and purposes, the cabin was home now.

 

*

 

Michael had always found the expression “making love” rankly sentimental. “Having sex” felt truer, if a little dispassionate. “Fucking” suited him best; it was what he did. But lying next to Alex afterwards, both of them smiling, stupid, laughing for no reason, slippery as dolphins in their own sweat, he reflected how apt it was, that expression “making love.” There was an awakening in the parts of his body that had always been numb—not just his imperfectly healed hand, but stranger things. His _bones_. He ran his thumb over Alex’s cheek. He’d expected a scene when he got back, Alex’s disappointed face and maybe some shouting, but it seemed like Valenti _hadn’t_ tattled to Alex—that Michael had spent the morning in the cave, pacing around Max’s pod, wracking his brains for a way to bring him back that didn’t require more killing, and how Michael had subsequently passed the afternoon, slouching around with a bottle of tequila and generally being a nuisance until he took the precaution of arresting himself so he could drink himself stupid with less interruption.

Alex was glad to see him. Tired from the effort of serving face at the AF base during the waning days of his enlistment period, but still impatient to be stripped of his uniform and tumbled into bed when Michael blew into the cabin like a hurricane thundercloud.

It was weightless, seamless between them now. The shift was difficult to pinpoint, but he supposed it had something to do with the nebulous covenant of _a relationship._ The certainty that the other would still be there in the morning, or if he wasn’t, he was just in the kitchen making coffee. Even so, the first words out of Michael’s mouth when he woke up were usually the same: _you stayed._

“Always the tone of surprise,” Alex would sigh.

Michael shifted onto his elbow so he could trace the line of Alex’s jaw with his fingertip. Then he ran his hand down Alex’s chest, thumbing one of his nipples, letting his palm settle over the trail of hair below his navel. He was nearly ready to go again, buoyed by the euphoria of round one and genuinely pleased with himself, that he was _here_ , with Alex, instead of out hitting the bottle.

Then Alex had to go and spoil it. “D’you think you’ll miss women?” he asked out of nowhere, staring up the ceiling. Voice carefully neutral.

“ _What_?” Michael blinked at him, incredulous. He waited for Alex to say _just kidding_ , but Alex wouldn’t look at him.

“If you don’t already…?” he dangled the question. Briefly his eyes flicked up to Michael’s face before skittering away again.

“Aw, Manes.” He forced a laugh. “You know you’ve always been more than a pair of tits to me.” But Alex didn’t crack a smile. Michael’s hand was still resting on Alex’s stomach; he felt it rise and fall as Alex took a few deliberate breaths.

“I saw Maria today,” Alex said, still looking everywhere except at him. “We’ve been trying…”

“To make up, yeah, I know, what does that have to do with me?”

It had been unpleasant, but inevitable, when they called it quits. She had too many questions that he didn’t want to answer. His fucking _hand_ , for one. He was barely keeping it together, Max and Rosa and Noah hovering behind his painted-on smile, his mother a scream caught in his throat. There was nothing easy about easy, as it turned out, nothing simple about simple. He did his best, because if he was trying, he wasn’t using her— _right?_ —and she was beautiful and effervescent and the sex was great and he liked making her come. But he was in love with Alex, and that was the greatest inevitability of all, no matter how fiercely he resisted. Isobel looked at him with contempt and told him he was a coward. And Isobel was the bravest person he knew, after Alex, so he pulled his head out of his ass and told Maria he was sorry, he hoped one day maybe she could forgive him but he would understand if she couldn’t. And then he went to Alex. He didn’t tell Alex he was sorry. He just said _okay_ and _I’m ready_ and that was that.

He didn’t know, he’d never asked, what kind of mental gymnastics Maria put herself through to rationalize her own betrayal of Alex.

“What’s it got to do with me?” he repeated.

“The two of you looked good together,” Alex said flatly. His expression was closed-off, brittle. “You’re hot, she’s hot, and today I couldn’t stop thinking how _right_ she was, and that if I were straight—”

Michael made a warning sound low in his throat.

“—she’s probably the person I’d pick, too,” Alex finished.

“I’m not straight,” Michael said.

“I know,” Alex told him, sighing. “You’re you, which means—”

“I’m incurably promiscuous? Is _that_ what you wanna say?”

“No. I’m saying what if I’m not enough for you? Because you have to, like, switch off a part of yourself to stay with me, and that’s—”

“Not how it works.” Michael rubbed his forehead. Bisexuality wasn’t rocket science, he thought, but then he didn’t find rocket science particularly complicated, either. So maybe he’d just been born upside-down, born the wrong way around; there had to be some reason why he was so out of joint with everyone else. Things other people found simple—stability, sobriety, steady relationships—confounded him, while the things that came naturally to _him_ —sex, science, the space-time continuum—made them go cross-eyed.

The Michael Guerin Freak Show, broadcast live 24/7. And thanks to the concerted efforts of Maria and Liz, he had pretty strong publicity these days. Seemed like just about everyone had an opinion, eager to weigh in on the Big Bisexual Question.

He bit the inside of his cheek.

“And now I’ve fucked up and said the wrong thing.” Alex groaned and pulled the pillow over his head. “What I _actually_ meant to say is, ‘Hey, Guerin, I’m having an insecure moment over your ex-girlfriend’… but Manes men have a time-honored tradition of attacking first.”

Michael’s brain was telling him to toss out some sarcastic quip that would bring this conversation to a speedy conclusion, all the better to nurse his wounds in private, but then Valenti’s accusation from hours ago came back to him: _Don’t you think Alex deserves better?_ The answer hadn’t changed. _Alex deserves so much better._

_I’m not enough._

_You deserve better._

Kind of the same thing, wasn’t it?

So instead of his usual duck-and-dodge, Michael confiscated Alex’s hiding-pillow. Then he told him about his day. The morning in the cave, his tequila-soaked afternoon, what Valenti had said at the station. How he’d gone to tinker with the ship consul again—something like fear flickered through Alex’s eyes—but that he was done thinking about outer space because Alex was his home. Planet Alex.

Cautiously at first, Alex reached out to touch his face. Then, more confidently, he slid his hand into his hair. Michael hummed as Alex’s dexterous fingers combed through his curls, gently stroking, detangling, till he was practically purring. But then Alex’s grip tightened painfully. His eyes were swimming with tears, and Michael’s automatically filled in response. When one of them cried the other always did too.

It was beyond empathy, what they had. Beyond the psychic connection he shared with his siblings— _sibling_. Beyond time, beyond space.

Cosmic.

“Why is this still so fucking hard?” Alex said in a small voice.

“’Cause the universe is a coldhearted bitch,” Michael replied, eliciting a watery chuckle from Alex. “I think you’n me are always gonna be hard work.”

“At least the sex is epic,” Alex sighed.

“Only ever amenable in bed, that’s us,” he agreed. “Damned hard work the rest of the time.”

They were laughing again, finally. Then Alex said _I love you_ and Michael said _I love you back._ Alex started kissing down his belly, scarcely bothering to tease him before he took him in his mouth, and Michael’s last coherent thought was _well, that’s another storm we’ve weathered._

 

*

 

Another storm, a real one, sent them down to the bunker a few days later, interrupting a lazy afternoon in the trailer. Michael tried to convince Alex that storms were _fun_ in the airstream because you could really feel yourself getting battered about by the elements, and you hadn’t lived until your flimsy metal capsule had been struck by lightning—

“It’s a tornado warning, Guerin,” Alex said, waving some iPhone alert under his nose. “And I’d rather stay in Kansas, if that’s okay with you.”

“Manes, we’re in New Mexico—”

“ _Guerin_ —”

“You have very little faith in my powers,” Michael complained, but Alex held firm and they relocated to the bunker. Underground, Alex seemed content to sit on the floor, legs extended before him, but Michael prowled around his lab, switching out three different records on the turntable before he found something that suited him. Ella Fitzgerald suited him. Then he wondered if there were any surfaces where he and Alex might fuck without, like, totally destroying his life’s work.

“Guerin,” Alex sighed. “Can you chill, please?” He rolled up his pant leg and began unfastening his prosthesis, which suggested he was settling in for a long wait and probably _not_ in the mood for precarious sex against a lab table.

_Let’s build a stairway to the stars_ , Ella sang.

“I’m just gonna have a look outside,” Michael was saying, when suddenly the computer started beeping, just as it had done the other day. “Maybe you can take a look at this?” he asked Alex, glad for a distraction. “Computer might have a virus or something.”

Alex looked put out; he had just finished removing his prosthetic leg. But casual intimacy came instinctively to Michael. He hauled Alex upright and deposited him in a swivel chair, which he proceeded to roll over to the computer. “How’s that for _Driving Miss Daisy_?” he said smugly.

“You’re a moron,” Alex told him.

They looked at the screen, Michael leaning over Alex’s shoulder.

“What the hell?” Alex said.

The screen was crammed with pop-ups, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Each one bearing a number:

96,688,365,498,695  
96,688,365,498,694  
96,688,365,498,693  
96,688,365,498,692

and so on.

“Christ,” Michael said. “Have I been hacked or what?”

“No idea,” Alex said. “Did you run any kind of diagnostic?”

“Nah, figured I’d just ask you…”

Alex clicked around some, trying to navigate through the endless windows. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Some kind of sequence? It must replicate something.”

“Well it’s a diminishing mathematical progression.” Michael stated the obvious. “A countdown?”

“But a countdown of what?” Alex murmured. The pop-ups were continuing to appear as they sat in front of the screen. “ _To_ what?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s probably encrypted. I’ll try and isolate the operational status of one of these things…” He launched some kind of program Michael didn’t recognize, so he zoned out a little. Admiring the nape of Alex’s neck, the exposed strip of skin between his hair and the collar of his shirt. Unable to resist the lure, he brushed his lips over it, tasted Alex’s skin with the tip of his tongue.

“Guerin! I’m trying to concentrate.”

Michael scraped his teeth over a protruding vertebra. His hands crept around Alex’s shoulders, reaching discreetly for his shirt buttons. He undid one, then another, then—

“Got something!” Alex announced, swatting his hands away. “But—I’m not sure what it means.”

Michael reluctantly dragged his focus back to the screen.

_PROMETHEUS/S XVI  
_ _Interval: 69 hours_

“I tried to source one of the numbers,” Alex explained. “The result doesn’t mean anything to me, though, what about you?”

“Nope,” Michael said. “Do another?”

_JANUS/S X  
_ _Interval: 97 weeks_

That rang a bell somewhere. Michael pulled out his phone to double check, and he was right. “Prometheus and Janus are both moons in Saturn’s orbit,” he said. “Prometheus is designated S XVI and Janus is S X, so that’s what the first part means. No clue about the intervals, though. ’Cause this only started a few days ago, and they’re coming in every few seconds, not every 97 weeks or whatever. Which means they’re really compressed, laterally.” He ran a hand over his chin and winced, trying to remember the last time he’d shaved. “Alex, could you find the biggest number, the first one that came through, and, like, try to backdate it? Figure out when it would have been received, before the temporal compression?”

“I can try,” Alex said dubiously. “But you need to stop hovering. Go away and do something else.”

“Sure thing, Captain.” He wandered off to flip the record and find something to drink. The bunker housed his rather extensive stockpile of booze and acetone, but he was trying to _change_ —doctor’s orders— so he tore into a case of fancy mineral water that Isobel had donated. “Hey Alex, you want one of these La Croix things?” he called. “There’s lime and peach-pear and something called… _pamplemousse_? whatever the fuck that is.”

No reply.

“Alex?”

“You need to see this.” Alex’s voice had an awed, hushed quality that made his hair stand on end. He dashed back over to the computer.

“What? What did you find?”

“I got a timestamp for the first number,” Alex said. “Michael… It came through on June 14, 1947.”

“The day of the crash,” Michael said.

 

*

 

Isobel met them back at the cabin after the storm had run its course.

The route was littered with debris stirred up by the lashing winds and rain, and a giant fir tree had fallen across the road. Michael blasted it out of the way with his mind, too keyed-up for a patient levitation, and the tree exploded into a thousand fragments. Pine needles showered down, covering the windshield and gunking up the wipers. “Nice,” Alex said drily.

Sheepishly, Michael cleared away the pine needles.

By the time Isobel arrived, Michael was clutching a sheaf of papers, dozens of closely-printed pages, millions of numerals, all grouped by origin, interval, and uncompressed date of arrival, thanks to a handy bit of code Alex had managed to sort out. The pages were only a fraction of the deluge of signals that had come through, that were _still_ coming through, but it was a decently representative sample spanning the last seventy years.

That was what Michael relayed to Isobel in a breathless rush while Alex tried to figure out dinner in the kitchen. Because they still had to _eat_ , Alex said. Fine, whatever, Michael had replied, pages flying through his fingers. He’d always had a diffident relationship with food, ever since he was a kid, because there had been too many times when he’d gone without so he’d disciplined himself to ignore hunger. He could get further on a cup of coffee and a swig of acetone than most people could get on a three-course dinner, he figured. But Alex figured otherwise, and now that they were basically cohabitating, mealtimes were observed. _Enforced._

“I don’t follow,” Isobel said, interrupting him mid-flow. “Slow down, start over, and use normal words.”

Rolling his eyes, he tried again.

Her beauty had hardened, crystallized since Noah, and there was something almost majestic about her grief these days. But she and Michael had drawn closer, closed ranks. Not just because they’d lost Max—but also because Isobel, somewhere in the depths of her self-absorption, had started to realize the magnitude of what Michael had given up ten years ago. When he took responsibility for the girls’ deaths, when he relinquished his scholarship to stay behind in Roswell, playing the role of deadbeat—a little too convincingly—even as he built a secret lab devoted to unlocking the secrets of space travel. She never acknowledged as much, of course, but it was _there_ , implicit, in the rebalancing of their relationship.

He still irritated her, though.  

“ _Michael_ ,” Isobel snapped. “Sorry I’m not smart enough for your little genius club, you’ll have to do better than lateral compression and—and whatever else you’re ranting about. Also, your hair looks ridiculous.”

“It’s the fucking humidity, don’t blame me.” He made a futile effort to impose some kind of order on his hair. He’d threatened to buzz it off during the last heat wave, but Alex had howled like a wounded animal at the very suggestion so he’d resigned himself to the mess on his head. “The numbers are some kind of countdown,” he said patiently. “I started receiving them on my computer a few days ago and they’re pouring in, a new one every couple seconds. But they’re compressed—meaning the transmissions actually started coming in a long time ago, at all sorts of different intervals depending on the source—”

“The source?”

Michael looked over at Alex, who shrugged. “Saturn,” Michael said, knowing how outrageous it sounded. “The moons of Saturn, actually. It has more than sixty of them, but the signals are concentrated between two in particular, Prometheus and Janus.”

“Fascinating,” Isobel said. “The light-bringer and the god of time. And this matters because…?”

“Alex was able to untangle the data encryption to find the actual timestamp for each signal. The biggest number, the first numeral that was transmitted, is dated June 14, 1947.”

“Oh my god.” Isobel sank into an armchair.

Michael forced himself to shut up and give her a moment to process. He joined Alex in the kitchen. Between the two of them, Michael was probably the better cook, if only because combining ingredients was close enough to ‘science experiment’ that he could apply the same method, more or less. But he was also haphazard and easily distracted, which put the onus on Alex.

“The water’s taking forever to boil,” Alex complained.

“Try covering the pot,” Michael advised. “Want me to throw on some meat for the sauce? Lemme ask Isobel what she’s—Yo Iz!” he hollered. “You eating cow this month?”

“Only if it’s organic and pasture-raised,” Isobel called back.

She was quiet when they sat down to dinner, but she thanked Alex very nicely for the spaghetti and didn’t comment on the somewhat rubbery mushrooms floating in the sauce. Michael smirked at her when Alex wasn’t looking; she just rolled her eyes.

“So…?” Michael prompted after a few minutes had gone by in silence.

“Well.” Isobel put her fork down. “I guess I just don’t understand how any of this will help Max?”

“Max?”

“Yes, _Max_ , our dead brother,” she snarled. “Remember him?”

“Of course I remember him—”

“You need to focus on the real work here, Michael! I couldn’t be happier that you’ve finally burst out of your flimsy little closet to live your best life now, but postcards from Saturn are one distraction too many—”

His temper spiked at the insinuation. “So as soon as my personal life isn’t a trainwreck, it’s a _distraction_? Look, I know yours isn’t so hot right now, but you don’t have to be such a bitch— _ow._ ” Alex had kicked him under the table. With his fucking prosthetic foot, which hurt a lot more than the flesh-and-bone one. “Let me rephrase that,” he said through gritted teeth. “No, I don’t know how any of this will help Max, not yet. But I’ll figure it out. Nothing is a coincidence when it comes to us, and whatever this countdown means, it all started when our spaceship crashed through the stratosphere.”

“If there’s anything to be learned from these numbers, about where you came from and how you got here, it can only help us bring Max back,” Alex added, and Michael looked at him gratefully. “I’ll keep trying to decode the sequence, and our aerospace engineer over here will sort out the quantum…”

Isobel pursed her lips, still looking like she wanted to throttle him.

“What else have we got?” Michael demanded. “It’s not like Liz is making any progress either—”

“No, she’s too busy babysitting her zombie sister,” Isobel snapped. “So excuse me if I’m not jumping up and down for either of you right now.”

Michael was beginning to feel deflated by her reaction. If he was perfectly honest with himself, Max _hadn’t_ been at the forefront of his mind over the past few hours. Every time he thought about his brother, he was consumed by helpless fury and grief, because the fucking _hubris_ of that motherfucker with his lightning bolts, playing god and bringing a dead girl back to life—

Thinking about Max made him want to scream, cry, and puke all at once. Thinking about Max made him want to get completely wasted and disappoint all the people who cared about him. So he tried to limit thinking about Max to his vigils in the cave, where he could yell and holler till he was blue in the face as he harvested samples from the pod for Liz to experiment on.

It had been a relief to project his mind back into the stars, to think about the icy moons of Saturn and wonder at the origin of those mysterious numerals instead of dwelling on Max. Isobel and Liz did nothing but dwell on Max, and frankly, he was sick of Max; even in death or stasis or whatever you wanted to call it, Max _still_ managed to call the shots—

“Michael,” Alex said softly.

All the light bulbs were rattling in their fixtures. He took a breath, and they went still. “Sorry,” he said.

Isobel glanced between them. “Unreal,” she said. “He’s finally housebroken. Alex, however did you do it?”

“Tons of sex,” Alex said blithely, and Michael choked on his water.

 

*

 

Alex was leaning against the headboard, smiling sleepily, the white sheet pulled down to the first suggestion of pubic hair. “C’mere,” he said, and Michael went willingly, pushing down his sweatpants and kicking them aside. He tugged the sheet away and draped himself on top of Alex.

“Where were you?” Alex asked.

Michael settled between his legs, resting his cheek on Alex’s stomach. “Crunching numbers,” he admitted. “Couldn’t sleep, didn’t wanna wake you, thought I’d take another look…”

“You need to _rest_ ,” Alex said firmly, twisting one of Michael’s ringlets around his finger.

“All my chaos, my entropy—it’s like a thousand voices buzzing inside my head these days, and they only go quiet when I’m working or… having sex.” He nuzzled his way up Alex’s chest, nosing at the fine thatch of hair along his sternum. “And I can only do one of those things by myself.” He tilted his head up for a kiss, and Alex obliged. A gentle press. He traced Alex’s upper lip with his tongue, not actually certain if he wanted this to lead anywhere.

It was five in the morning— _zero five hundred_ , Alex would say—and they’d gone at it until late, late, late. Sometime after the second round, Alex had called him insatiable, and Michael had flinched, dismayed and ashamed of himself. But Alex had only laughed and drawn him closer, draping his good leg over Michael’s shoulder and guiding him inside.

Now Michael’s thighs ached, his dick was sore, and it hurt to sit down. Everything about him was excessive, he knew that, from his unmanageable hair to his irrepressible libido. The wildness of his moods, the fathomless depths of his love.

Nothing in moderation.

“ _Sorry_ ,” he groaned. But his hands crept into Alex’s hair anyway, of their own volition. He’d always been too tactile, his willingness to encroach on someone’s space increasing exponentially the more he trusted them. “I’m a goddamn mess.”

“You’re not, though,” Alex told him. He was exceptionally beautiful that morning, Michael decided, with his tousled hair and rich dark eyes aglow with sincerity and purpose. “Actually, you’re pretty good, Michael.”

Michael looked at him skeptically.

“Think about it,” Alex said. “We both know what it looks like when you go off the rails, and this isn’t it. You’re coping pretty well in my opinion.”

“All thanks to you.” He said it flippantly, about to make a crack about sex and coping mechanisms, but as soon as the words were out in the air, he realized how utterly true they were. “Yeah. That’s what it is. Thanks for… not looking away.”

That expression, _I never look away_ —for a long time it had been their fumbling substitute for a different phrase that neither of them had dared think, much less vocalize. They knew how to say _I love you_ now, and they did, but sometimes _I never look away_ meant something more.

“Never do,” Alex promised, kissing his nose, the furrow between his brows. “Never will.”

“Me neither.”

“I promise.”

“Me too.” Michael hesitated. “Can I…”

“Can you what?”

“I know it’s been a lot, but…”

“What do you want, Guerin?”

“Maybe I could just… _sit_ on your cock?” Michael suggested. “I won’t even move if we’re too sore, just, like, sit there.”

Alex laughed, he _really_ laughed; head thrown back, ribs heaving. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes as his whole body shook with unrestrained mirth.

“Was it something I said?” He loved making Alex laugh.

Alex raised his hands in a gesture of mock-surrender and sat up against the headboard. He was still chortling like an idiot when Michael straddled his lap and reached for the lube.

“Ah, shit,” Michael said a few minutes later. “This was a really bad idea, huh?”

A few minutes later: “Definitely not our best.”

A few minutes later: “I can take it, Manes, don’t give me that look.”

A few minutes after that: “I’m gonna move now, okay? Real slow.”

A few minutes later still: “This might be going somewhere.”

“Guerin,” Alex grunted, “you need to shut up.”

“C’mon, you can’t talk while you fuck me? ’Cause I’ve never had trouble fucking _you_ and talking while I—mmmph—”

His last orgasm of the night—or first of the morning, depending on which way you tilted your head—was nearly dry, and he was so oversensitive he hadn’t expected to get there at all. But he and Alex had a knack for wringing that last unexpected bit of pleasure from each other’s bodies, long after they should have quit.

“Never again,” Michael groaned, levering himself off Alex and settling gingerly on his side. “I think I might’ve just fuckin’ prolapsed my asshole.”

“I’m sure Valenti can put it back in for you,” Alex snickered as he cuddled up to spoon him. Michael knew he had a snappy rejoinder somewhere in his brain, but it floated out of reach as he finally, _finally_ , passed the fuck out and fell into dreamless sleep.

 

*

 

Michael had his head under the bonnet of an old Forester when the idea occurred to him.

He abandoned the car and hastened to his bunker, half-falling down the ladder in his impatience. The alien glass beckoned him, glowing beneath the dropcloth. He pulled the cover aside and let his fingertips dance over the surface. The colors swirled and twinkled like constellations, and he felt them tug at his mind, like the turning of a tide. Then he sat in front of his laptop with notebook, compass and protractor, and spent the next several hours so immersed in his calculations that he lost all sense of the passage of time.

He was shaking when he finally put down his pencil. His hand ached and he rubbed it absently, trying to roll the stiffness out of his neck and shoulders. He fired off a text to Alex, telling him to come to the scrapyard as soon as he finished up at the base. Then he cracked open a beer— _just the one_ —and went outside to wait for Alex. Nerves buzzing with so much adrenaline he couldn’t sit still. He paced back and forth across the yard and watched the setting sun sink lower and lower in the sky.

It was dusk when Alex finally drove up in a cloud of dust and tumbleweed. When he climbed out of the SUV, Michael saw he was still wearing his fatigues, though he’d doffed the cap with the insignia Michael liked to make fun of. But he couldn’t even appreciate Alex in uniform right now. “What’s going on?” Alex called, taking a step back as Michael surged toward him like a dust devil.

“Figured something out,” Michael said, seizing his arm and towing him across the yard. “Something major.”

Politely, he stood aside to let Alex go down the ladder first. But Alex paused on the first rung, eyeing him… _appreciatively_? Michael wasn’t sure what to make of it. “Guerin,” Alex said at last, a laugh in his voice, “are you planning to put a shirt on anytime soon?”

“Oh, yeah…” He glanced down at his bare chest. He’d ditched the shirt while he was working on the car under the blazing midday sun. “I’ll just go… find it.”

Once they were down in the bunker and he’d pushed Alex into a chair, Michael launched into it, stumbling over the words in his haste to get them out. “The first thing you have to know is that the alien glass, the consul from our spacecraft that I’m rebuilding—” he registered Alex’s pained expression and amended, “ _was_ rebuilding, it’s—Alex, it’s _alive._ I don’t know what, or how, or why, but it’s conscious; it has some kind of consciousness. If I’m touching it and I’m quiet, my head’s clear, I can _feel_ it there, in my mind, reaching out to me.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “I mean, why not, right?”

Something in the flatness of his tone set off an alarm in the recesses of Michael’s brain, but he was too excited to pause. “I think that’s how they—my people, I mean, the ones onboard—I think that’s how they piloted the ship. Through some kind of psychic link with the consul. It’s only a hypothesis for now, and the thing’s still missing a piece. But that’s not the only thing I figured out,” he went on. “The day the numbers started coming through, I had my hand on the glass. Just kind of drifting, wondering about my home planet and how we ended up here. That was when the first transmission popped up on my computer screen.”

“Coincidence?”

“Don’t believe in ’em. Anyway, then I looked back the sources; you’d traced most of them to the vicinity of Prometheus and Janus. _Then_ I tracked down some records from NASA, and it turns out they’d detected some kind of gravitational anomaly near Saturn, right between those two moons, which seems to have started seventy years ago…” His heart was racing and he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath. “With me so far?”

“I think so.” Alex steepled his fingers under his chin. “But—”

“So I studied the diagrams and did my own calculations. It’s not just a gravitational anomaly, Alex, it’s a disturbance of spacetime. D’you know what that means?”

Alex compressed his lips and shook his head.

“It’s a fucking _wormhole_!” he shouted triumphantly. “Isobel figured it out last week, but none of us realized—Janus—the god of doorways, passages, and _time_ —hence the two faces—and Prometheus, bearer of light—a wormhole electromagnetically transmits light from one region to another—”

“Where does it lead?”

“Another galaxy.” Michael couldn’t help himself, he was beaming, nearly bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

“A wormhole…” Alex hesitated. “Wormholes aren’t—obviously I’m way out of my depth here, but—… I didn’t think they existed?”

“And you’re right, kind of. A wormhole isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon. Someone placed it there.”

“Someone…” Alex stood up suddenly. “You mean _aliens_? Your people? And that’s how you got here?”

“That’s my theory.” Michael nodded. “I think they opened up a wormhole to come here, and home is somewhere through that passage, in the adjacent galaxy. And…”

“And?”

For a moment he thought there was a greenish tinge to Alex’s face, but he put it down to the glow from all the flickering screens. “And since the signals are still coming through, that means the wormhole is still open.”

 

*

 

He was like a man possessed. _Home_ , that mysterious never-neverland somewhere over the rainbow, had suddenly become a lot closer. It had become _real._ Of course it eluded his senses still; he couldn’t see it, hear it, or touch it, but it was _there._ Those baffling sequences of numbers, still piling up on his computer screen, were pings from across the universe. Arcing through space and time to reach him here, on Earth.

_I’m so close, Mom. Everything you never got to show me…_

Apocalyptic with hope, he threw himself into the work. He stopped visiting the cave; he had too much to get done. His communications with Isobel and Liz grew brief, terse. Neither of them bothered to hide their impatience; they thought he was wasting time—his, theirs, Max’s.

“You’re an engineer, Mikey, a scientist,” Liz told him wearily, “not a fantasist.”

But Michael had always found it difficult to sustain that impersonal attitude of passive acceptance embedded in the scientific tradition. He tried to think of Galileo before the Inquisition, of Marie Curie dying slowly from radiation poisoning. That kind of temperance was admirable; it just wasn’t in his wheelhouse.

And so, feet planted firmly in the stars, he let the world fall away.

Secluded in his lab, he felt freer. Space was the place. No gossip, no speculative looks, no people—well-meaning or otherwise—sticking their fucking noses in his business.

But Alex wasn’t _people_ , and Michael went home to the cabin every night.

Alex’s nightmares had taken a turn for the worse recently, sending him back to the killing fields of Kandahar and Mosul on an almost nightly basis. Tangled in the sheets, he would flail and pitch over the side of the bed, landing with a painful thud and a startled cry if Michael’s hands and telekinesis weren’t quick enough to catch him. But Michael almost always caught him. The worst was when Alex dreamed himself back in Baghdad, where he rattled through the streets in a Humvee until an ear-shattering blast ripped through his body. And when he woke up, he had to relive the loss of his leg again, again, again.

Michael knew better than to touch him, or try to restrain him. He just said Alex’s name over and over, low and soothing, _it’s okay_ , _it’s okay_ , even though he knew it wasn’t. When Alex woke his eyes were glassy and unfocused, his entire body wracked with tremors. Only then would Michael place a careful hand on his cheek or wrap an arm around his shoulders. Soft words and gentle touches. Finally Alex drew in a sharp breath and blinked away his tears. When his eyes met Michael’s, they were brimming with confusion, pain, fear, and shame. That last one, _shame_ , was the only enemy Michael could do something about. He told Alex how brave he was, how much he loved him, how he admired his courage, hope, self-discipline—and his eyes, his mouth, his ass. That made Alex laugh. “Okay, Manes,” Michael said, spooning up behind him. “That’s enough _Bombs over Baghdad_ for one night.”

In the morning, he went back to work.

 

*

 

Michael frowned at the computer screen.

The transmissions had leveled off at last, a new one only every few hours or so. The signals from Janus had apparently reached the end of their run, and those from Prometheus were soon to be over. Down to the single digits. He was no closer to cracking what the diminishing progression of numbers replicated than when he’d first discovered it weeks ago.

His frustration was mounting. He hated to concede that Isobel might be right and he’d wasted all this time barking up the wrong tree… when he should have been redoubling his efforts to bring Max back to life… Except Michael didn’t know if the dead even _should_ come back. Rosa terrified him, with her livid autopsy scars and those horrible burns that he’d given her when he set the car alight. But then Liz had also died, if only for a second. And Michael—had _he_ died, too, after Noah stabbed him with the broken syringe? Or had he simply lost a ton of blood? He didn’t know. He’d never had the chance to ask Max.

The thought sickened him.

His phone rang. “What up, Liz?” he said wearily.

“Are you going out to the cave today?” she asked.

“Nah, no time.”

Liz sent a facetime request; he accepted reluctantly.

“ _What_?”

“Michael…” Liz was at the hospital, he could see the lab behind her. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t have anything for you yet.”

“No, me neither, that’s not why I’m calling.”

Max or no Max, Liz was basically his sister-in-law, and despite how complicated she’d made his life recently, Michael loved her. But he could see her stern expression on the screen, the impatient way she flipped her hair back, and he didn’t want another lecture. “I’m pretty busy right now,” he said.

“This isn’t about Max, tranquílate,” Liz said. “It’s about Maria. And Alex.”

Michael fought the urge to snap at her. Tranquílate, seriously? _She’s just trying to help_ , he reminded himself; Liz was always trying to help. But he felt tense and awkward whenever the topic shifted from science to anything more… personal. Personal as in pertaining to him. “I can’t talk about Maria with you,” he said. “It would only make things worse. She’s your friend, I’ve got no right, but…” He took a breath and decided to go for it. “But _she_ didn’t either, if I’m being honest. Neither did you.”

“What are you talking about?” Liz looked confused. “No right to _what_?”

“I would’ve told you myself, you know,” he said tightly. “But there was so much shit going down, it was kind of like the last thing on my mind at the time.”

“Told me what? Michael—”

“About _me_.” He stared over her shoulder at a poster on the wall. The phone screen was too tiny for him to make out the lettering, but he remembered it from high school. _Carol never wore her safety goggles._ Ha fucking ha. _Now she doesn’t need them._ He forced himself to look back at Liz. “About me and Alex. That I was his museum person. Not that I give a shit anymore. Me’n Alex are what we are. Public knowledge.” His mouth was incredibly dry, he couldn’t even swallow. “But it’s _my_ life,” he ground out. “Maria told you ’cause she was upset, okay, fine, fair play to her, but then _you_ told Valenti, you told Rosa, and you told your dad, ‘Oh, Guerin’s Alex’s Museum Guy. Turns out he was bisexual all along.’ That fucking _sucked_ , Liz.”

“Mikey…” Her eyes were enormous, and she looked absolutely stricken.

“It wasn’t Maria’s secret to tell, and it sure as hell wasn’t yours.”

“Oh, Michael, I’m _sorry_. I just thought it was so sweet, you and Alex…”

He didn’t want to twist the knife when Liz already had so much of her own shit to deal with. But he wasn’t quite through. “You can’t just _out_ somebody, Liz. No matter how _sweet_ you think it is.”

Liz clapped her hands over her mouth; he could barely understand what she said next. “When you and Alex got together—got _back_ together—I was so _happy_ for you, even though you hurt Maria. It was like the universe had finally managed to get something right, after so many awful things happening to us…”

It wasn’t the _universe_ , Michael thought. It was him and Alex, putting in the hard fucking work. But he didn’t feel like sharing that. “It doesn’t matter,” he said roughly, clearing his throat. “I gotta get back to work, so what did you wanna say about Alex?”

“Oh…” Liz seemed to be on the verge of tears, but to his relief she didn’t pull a Max and make him feel guilty about making _her_ feel guilty. “I don’t know the exact details of what you’re working on, but whatever those numbers from Saturn mean, you’ve got Alex spinning out that you really mean to leave this time. He won’t tell you so, because he’s Alex. So _I’m_ telling you. But you’re not going anywhere, are you, Mikey?”

His stomach lurched. “Of course not,” he said, and ended the call.

She’d succeeded in making him feel guilty after all. Of course he wasn’t going anywhere. Of course he wasn’t. His work was pure speculation and hypothesis. The consul was short a piece, and he hadn’t done more than sketch out a new spacecraft to go with it. Hell, he hadn’t even confirmed the existence of the wormhole. They were talking _years_ of work here, before he could even _contemplate—_

_Shit._ He was a fucking idiot. For a guy who didn’t believe in coincidences, he’d been remarkably dense about the resurgence of Alex’s nightmares. His clinging desperation when they fucked. His tight smiles, the false brightness of his voice when he said _You go ahead, don’t worry about me._

Michael had messed up big time. He needed to shut down Project Wormhole, go home, and spend the rest of his life making it up to Alex. Possibly resurrecting Max. But mostly making it up to Alex.

He glanced back at his computer screen. Prometheus had just sent him the numeral _3_.

Christ but he hated a mystery.

Just one last quick experiment, maybe. He uncovered the consul and held his hand a few millimeters above the surface. It seemed to hum in welcome; the thing was _definitely_ sentient. He closed his eyes and felt its tendrils reaching for him, twining itself around his consciousness like a friendly cat.

Michael pressed his palm to the glass and opened his mind.

The current surged toward him like a tidal wave, or an endless river, its great voice mounting louder and louder in his head. As it enveloped him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, and this time he let himself be drawn into it, borne away on its powerful back. As it carried him forward, he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. He saw Saturn, he saw its moons, and between them he saw the wormhole, a glowing spiral in the darkness. He tried to look through it, but all he glimpsed was a fragment of constellation, a glittering diadem not unlike the Canes Venatici. He needed a better vantage. And the current seemed to hear him, it made rungs for his feet, it let him climb higher up its bank. He _felt_ the next transmission come through, _2_ , its archaic voice hurtling into his mind from the far end of the wormhole. He squinted into it, saw a bright sun-star, then another star, this one with a greenish cast— _could it be_? _Yes_ , the current told him, _yes, yes, yes…_ not a star but a planet, eclipsed by the sun-star, receding further and further as the cosmic river bore him hence. _Wait,_ he said, _slow down a minute! Let me see!… We can’t,_ the great voice said. _It is the end. Time only flows forward…_ And now a whole tumult of voices was screaming in his head, the stars, the planet, he could hear them all, too much information for his brain to process—… He felt his body beginning to dissolve, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current… and a final transmission, slicing through the noise, _1..._ still looking backward, he saw the wormhole twist, contort, collapse in on itself… and vanish into nothingness, leaving no trace in the great expanse of darkness.

Excruciating pain tore through his body, he had a body again, and the mighty current was gone. He was standing outside in the desert, except all around him the outlines of the road and the hills and the airstream had faded, as if all color and life had been bleached from them. A chorus of voices moved across his brain, resonating from the hills and the scrub and the sand, like they were trying to carry him back through time, down endless corridors to the first thresholds of the world. He felt the weight of a distant escarpment, felt distinctly the countless millions of years since it had first reared out of the magma of the Earth’s crust. The dark gullies and fissures, the smooth boulders by the roadside, all carried a distinct image of themselves across to him. He could feel the separate identity of each sand grain and salt crystal calling to him. Above, he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, like jostling radio beacons. He saw the dim red disk of Sirius, heard its ancient voice, untold millions of years old, dwarfed by the huge spiral nebulae in Andromeda, their voices even older. The shimmering traverse of the Milky Way. The sky was an endless babbling babel, a thousand galaxies— _going, going, gone_ —overlaying each other in his mind. Chaos like he had never known before, infinite chaos of clamoring nebulae and constellations, it was deafening, it was going to kill him—

_Going, going, gone._

But then he saw Alex, striding toward him in living color, something clutched under his arm.

Alex.

He fixated on him, mirage though he surely was, and the chaos receded. The voices too, until there was just one in particular that he could discern. It sounded familiar, and it was repeating a word over and over.

_Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael…._

His name. Alex’s voice.

Michael hit the ground on his knees, and the darkness took him.

 

*

 

His eyelids felt heavy. It took several tries to force them open. When he finally managed it, he found himself staring up at Alex’s pale, terrified face. He wanted to ask Alex what was the matter with his face, why was he looking at him like that, but then his entire body convulsed and his spine bent back like a bow.

He puked spectacularly all over them both.

_Whoa_.

Alex toppled backward in astonishment. Michael reached for him instinctively, catching hold of his collar, further smearing the godawful mess between them.

“Michael…” Alex was gaping at him like a beached fish. His mouth opened and closed several times. “I really, _really_ thought you were dead.”

_Dead_? That seemed a little extreme. “Boot and rally,” he said cheerfully; he felt just fine. But Alex… “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.

“I—I came here to bring you this…” he watched Alex fumble around him, extricating something half-buried in the sand. “The last missing piece. I’m sorry, Michael, I had it all along.” Alex brushed it clean and offered it to him.

Michael squinted at the thing in Alex’s hand. Dull and lifeless, it could have been any shard of glass. “That’s not mine,” he said, puzzled. “It’s just broken glass, Alex, there’s nothing alien there.”

“I… I think it _was_ ,” Alex insisted. He frowned at the glass, his expression baffled. “There used to be all these colors swirling around, I know it had them when I left—but maybe something’s happened to it, maybe I broke it somehow…?” His voice was heavy with contrition, head bowed penitently. Michael had never seen this posture on him before.

“Where did you find it?” he asked quietly.

“Jim Valenti had it.” Alex bit his lip. “There was a secret hiding place in the cabin…”

“ _When_ did you find it?”

“Months ago,” Alex admitted. “Before you told me who you were and showed me what you were building down there. I’d actually brought it with me, that day we talked, ’cause I thought it might have something to do with you. But when I realized you were trying to leave the planet, I… panicked. I kept it.”

“But you’d already broken up with me.”

“I know.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make.”

“I know.”

“So why now?” They were sitting on their asses in the dirt, covered with vomit, and Alex had been keeping secrets again. _This is a low_ , Michael thought dully.

“I’d… forgotten about it, honestly,” Alex said miserably. “Noah, Caulfield, my dad, your mom. Then Max and Rosa. I only remembered a few weeks ago, when the numbers started. And then you found the wormhole, and I started freaking out again…”

“You thought I was gonna...” Michael pulled his stained shirt over his head and tossed it aside. He drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. “You thought I’d fix the consul, rebuild my ship, then bye-bye Major Tom?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Look, Alex, that’s _years_ away.” He couldn’t muster up any real indignation. Alex holding out on him, hoarding the glass as some kind of insurance policy to keep him Earthbound—well, who could blame him, after the way Michael had behaved recently? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got too involved in this, never stopped to think how it might look to you. I’m really sorry, okay?”

Alex’s head shot up. “Wait, you’re apologizing to _me_?”

“Let me finish,” Michael said. He pushed his hair out of his face. “ _If_ I manage to pull this off—and that’s a big fucking _if_ , I mean years down the line—it’ll be a conversation. And the conversation will start something like this: ‘Hey Alex, do you feel like venturing into deep space with me, in full knowledge that we might die out there?’ And if you say, ‘No thanks, Guerin, I wanna stay here’—well, that’s it. We stay. _Together._ Conversation closed.” He offered Alex a lopsided smile. “I mean, c’mon Manes—you really think I’d rocket off without you, after everything? Thought you were smarter than that.”

Alex shook his head. “Not when it comes to you, apparently.” He gave Michael a beady-eyed once-over. Michael raised his eyebrows. Yeah, he might have taken off his shirt, but he was also completely disgusting right now. Yet Alex’s gaze was neither appreciative nor critical. It was concerned.

“So what the _hell_ happened to you?” Alex demanded. “When I got here, you were coming up from the bunker, and you were glowing purple, your eyes had turned black, and—I don’t know, it was like you were possessed or something. You couldn’t see me or hear me or anything—”

“I was _purple_?” Michael interrupted. “Purple, how?”

“Purple and pink, like the alien glass, the colors were moving all over your skin…” Now Alex looked like _he_ might throw up. “It was awful. Please Michael, you have to tell me what—”

“I don’t know!” His memory felt fuzzy around the edges. “I remember being in my lab. I remember touching the consul. It’s sentient, like I told you. Some kind of consciousness. I was trying to, like, vibe with it as a last resort, see if it could tell me anything about those numbers…” He scratched his chin, grimacing when flakes of dried vomit came off on his hand. “And then—I don’t know. It sort of overwhelmed me, I guess? Swept me away. I must have blacked out, I don’t even remember climbing up the ladder. Next thing I know, I’m lying nice and cozy in your arms and puking all over you. Sorry about that, by the way.”

“Don’t mention it,” Alex said.

“Ugh.” Michael got to his feet and stretched. He felt Alex’s eyes on him again, definitely appreciative this time, and he thought, slightly awestruck, that Alex must really love him if he could look at him like _that_ , when he was spattered with sick. He offered Alex a hand and pulled him to his feet. They’d go home. Shower. Preferably together. Then a long, uninterrupted night.

Except—

“Let me see that glass again?” he said, and Alex passed it over. He closed his eyes and tried to feel for it with his mind. “I’m not getting anything,” he said after a moment. Maybe Alex had been mistaken? “I’ll play with it later,” he told him. “Just gonna drop it off in the lab, then we’ll go home, okay?”

Alex caught his fingers, and, to his surprise, reeled him in for a brief, firm embrace. _What’s this about?_ he wondered, barely getting his arms up before Alex was releasing him and backing away. “Yeah. We’ll go home,” Alex said. “You’re gross, Guerin.”

After Michael descended the ladder, he snagged a bottle of acetone and stowed it in his back pocket. He hadn’t gotten sick from exercising his powers in years; that crazy mind-meld with the consul must have really done a number on him. He’d have to build up a lot more stamina if he ever wanted to pilot an actual spacecraft…

_The consul_.

It lay on the table, splintered into a half-dozen pieces. Every one as dull, lifeless, and ordinary as the missing shard he held in his hand. When he closed his eyes and reached out to its consciousness with his own, the psychic silence was deafening.

Whatever the alien glass was, whatever it had been—all its beauty, all its mystery—was gone.

It was dead.

Flashes of what the glass had shown him—the receding planet, the sun, the constellations, the wormhole collapsing in on itself—the final transmissions coming through— _3, 2, 1_ —the night sky screaming inside his head—

Michael understood.

There was nothing more to do.

Beyond hope, but feeling oddly at rest, he climbed back up to Alex.

 

*

 

Three nights later, they drove out into the desert.

Alex gave him his space and bit his tongue on the questions he was clearly dying to ask. Michael loved him for it. He couldn’t talk, not yet, there was too much in his head, he needed to process, he needed _time_.

And he needed sleep. He slept for twenty hours while Alex fended off Isobel, Liz, and Valenti; he woke to a dozen texts, including one from Maria that read _im sorry for outing u._ He struggled to remember what that was about. He spent another day shuffling around the cabin in sweatpants and one of Alex’s Air Force sweatshirts, listening to Captain Beefheart and Taj Mahal and Frank Zappa and other avant bluesmen that Alex hated. Then he got bored and started repairing appliances around the cabin. When he ran out of things to repair he embarked on improvements. He rigged the kitchen into an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine engineered to crack a single egg. Alex’s reaction wasn’t quite what he’d hoped. He lapsed into stillness for a few hours. Then he pulled himself together, showered, and dressed in his own clothes. When Alex arrived home on the third evening he was sitting on the porch waiting for him.

“Wanna go for a drive?”

They drove out into the desert. Past Foster’s Ranch, down a winding dirt track, until they were miles from anywhere and it was just them and the sand and the stars. Michael turned off the engine and they went round to the back of the truck. They dug out the blankets and the cooler and settled themselves on the bed.

“We haven’t done this in a while,” Alex said.

“Always reminds me of high school.” Michael tore open the sixer and passed one to Alex before cracking another for himself. “It was a lot harder to get alone together back then.”

“You’ve upped your game considerably since high school.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ _Wanna go for a drive_?” Alex said, affecting a deep, husky drawl.

“Fuck you. I’m a poet.”

“Not to mention that shirt, Guerin.”

Michael glanced down. He’d only done up about half the buttons. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t.”

Michael pulled him into a brief clinging kiss. It was so _easy._ They could just…

_Too_ easy. He pulled back.

“I still don’t know how to explain it,” he said, tilting his head up to look at the stars. Sirius. Andromeda. Arcturus. _The stars look very different today._ “Whole thing sounds like a DMT trip.”

“Try me,” Alex said. He pressed Michael’s hand; Michael rotated his palm so he could lace their fingers together. A quick squeeze and he pulled away.

“Okay.” He could do this. He could talk. “Alex, I… have no idea where to start.”

“The beginning?”

“That’s part of the problem. There is no beginning. Just an end.” Michael felt a stab of loneliness. He shifted minutely closer to Alex on the blanket so their thighs were touching. “I hate endings.”

“Even happy ones?” Alex asked.

“Well, if it’s happy, it’s not really an ending, is it?”

They were getting off track. Why was talking so goddamn _hard_? He almost missed the old days of keeping secrets, when instead of spilling their guts they could just tumble into bed and… _fuck the pain away_? He remembered hearing that song pounding out of Rosa’s car back in high school, tenth grade. _What the hell is that?_ he’d asked, leaning his elbows on her windowsill. _Your new theme song, Guerin_ , she’d rapped back, and rolled up her window. A few weeks later he had sex the for first time, and he concluded that Rosa—and Peaches—were right. Fucking was the antidote to just about everything.

Alex jostled his shoulder lightly. “Where did you go?”

“Just a random memory. Nothing important.” He turned to look at him. “You’re the only person I’ve ever fallen in love with.” Well, _that_ was apropos of nothing. He felt his face grow hot but he kept his eyes pinned on Alex.

And Alex fucking _beamed._ He took Michael’s chin in his hand and stared deep into his eyes. “Love of my life,” he said, and Michael was only slightly miffed that Alex had managed to top his cheese factor. Yeah, feelings were cheesy as hell, but he figured it was good to talk about love sometimes when they _weren’t_ shouting at each other with tears in their eyes or imminently pre- or post-coital.

Suddenly he felt the words coming to him. “My people created that wormhole,” he said, shifting back into his own space and wrapping his arms around his knees. “That’s how we got here in ’47. ’Cause our galaxy was really far away, like light-years far, so… we made a shortcut. Those transmissions, all the numbers, they came from my planet—beamed through the wormhole in the wake of our spaceship.”

“Do you know what they mean? The numbers?”

“I called them a countdown, because they seemed to be decreasing. As it turned out, that’s exactly what they were.”

Alex’s next question was unspoken. _Countdown to what?_

“To… the end. Of my planet. The galaxy.”

“Why—?”

“Not sure. Maybe the transmissions were for the people on the ship, the ones who left. So they’d know, wherever they—we—ended up… Or maybe the signals were for _this_ solar system, this planet. I can only hypothesize. Whoever my people were, they were beaming the numbers out on the hydrogen line for anyone in the universe to hear.”

“That’s thoughtful of them, I guess?” Alex said uncertainly. “Providing a countdown... Even though the end must be a long way off, considering how gigantic those numbers were.”

Michael shook his head. “The numbers caught up with real time—Earth time, I mean—last week. The sequence had almost reached the end of its run when I was in the lab a few days ago. And when I touched the alien glass…” He ignored Alex’s horrified exclamation. Over the past few days he’d been trying to reconstruct what the consul had shown him, what had happened inside his mind—at least he _thought_ it was inside his mind. Who the fuck knew, honestly.

“The consul took me inside… _time_ ,” he continued, groping for the words _._ “It was like a wave or a big river, and it swept me up with it. But I didn’t look ahead, I looked backwards, to the direction it was coming from. I saw through the wormhole. And I saw… I saw my planet, Alex. I saw it dragged into the orbit of a giant sun.” His voice cracked. “I saw it die. And then the wormhole closed.”

His eyes were strangely dry. When Alex reached for him, he raised a hand to hold him off. “Before he died, Noah said something about a war on our planet. But it was more than that. The planet must have been dying for a long time, as it got closer to that sun... And the people on the spacecraft… we were the ones chosen—I don’t know how or why, and _fuck_ I do not want to—for a chance at survival somewhere else. The signals were from the people left behind. But they weren’t calling for help… They were saying goodbye.”

“It’s good…” Alex cleared his throat. “It’s good that you were there. To hear them.”

Finally, Michael felt tears pricking his eyes. He hadn’t thought about it that way, but Alex was right. It _was_ good. Good not to be alone in the universe. “They sent one final transmission when the series reached zero, and… the galaxy broke up. Then the consul must have died, and all the pieces of alien glass—because their source had died. It’s all gone, Alex. Everything. Forever.”

At last, Michael let himself sink against Alex’s shoulder. A few tears trickled down his nose and Alex held him close. But he didn’t fall apart. He was in the same state of purified emptiness that had settled over him when he found the dead consul.

“So that’s what you were seeing when I got there?” Alex pressed a kiss to the top of his head.

“No.” Michael closed his eyes. The memory still made him sick and dizzy. “I was… somehow, I was still in that time vortex _,_ trapped inside its dimension. I couldn’t get out. Everything around me, every particle, every grain of sand—I could hear each one of them, I could hear their time signatures, all screaming inside my head.” He shuddered at the echo of that awful clamor. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, Alex. Worse than dying. Worse than _love._ ” He smiled to himself, bumping his head against Alex’s. “It would’ve destroyed me if you hadn’t shown up when you did. I could barely see, but I heard your voice, and I shut out everything else.”

Alex’s arms tightened around him. After a several minutes had elapsed: “You’re… okay,” he said, and it was both a question and a statement.

“Yeah, I am,” Michael said. “For the first time in my life, I feel like my brain and my body are in the same place.” He tugged out of the embrace so he could face Alex directly. Alex’s face was so open, so luminous, in the starlight. “I’ve been trying to change for you, to be better for you, for—weeks, months,” he admitted. “I thought, if I stopped being an alcoholic, if I laid off the acetone a little, if I did domestic, domestic like Martha fucking Stewart—” he laughed at himself, bitterly—“then everything would be okay. ’Cause we love each other. And I thought loving you would make me a better man. Like, magically. And it does, in so many ways,” he added, pressing his fingers against Alex’s mouth when he opened it to protest. “But I was missing the point. I was too tangled up in time and space, thinking about here versus _there—_ ” he gestured vaguely at the sky. “But then I thought about my mom, who I knew for maybe all of thirty seconds, but I wanted to die with her anyway. I thought about being in love with you for ten, closing in on eleven, years now, and how we were apart for almost all that time but we still loved each other. I should’ve figured it out much sooner, that there was a higher dimension than space and time.”

Their faces were mere inches apart.

“What is it?” Alex asked breathlessly. Michael could see his pulse hammering in his neck.

“I think you know the answer to that one, darlin’,” he said, beginning to unbutton Alex’s shirt. There were too many of them. Too many buttons. He was breathing heavily by the time he finally pushed it off his shoulders and dove in for a kiss. He swept his tongue across Alex’s lips, and Alex opened up immediately, kissing him back with a small groan. Michael moved closer, beginning to press Alex back against the blankets. He ducked his face into the crook of his neck to skim his teeth, to bite and suck and run his tongue over the place where Alex’s pulse was beating so frantically. Alex’s hands slipped under his shirt, tugging it up and over his head. One of the advantages of a half-open shirt, he wanted to point out.

He reared back to pull off his boots, to unfasten his belt and drag his jeans and underwear down his thighs. Alex had paused in the middle of undoing his own flies to watch, and his expression was so hungry that Michael nearly toppled over from the force of it. He managed to get out of his clothes and flung them carelessly aside. Naked now, he crawled back to bury his face against Alex’s throat, letting his fingers quest down the hard, jittery muscles of Alex’s stomach. He followed the path of his hand with his mouth. When he glanced up from the feathery strip of hair beneath Alex’s navel, he saw him craning his neck to watch, his chest rising and falling in a quick, broken pattern. Alex reached for his zipper again, but Michael moved his hands away. “I got this,” he said.

He knew what a privilege it was, getting to undress Alex. To slide his pants down, to patiently ease the right leg over the prosthesis. Then the prosthesis itself. The vacuum suspension delighted him for the mobility it afforded, but he’d already spent plenty of time examining the mechanism. Deftly, he rolled down the suspension sleeve and lifted Alex’s leg out of the socket. This was perhaps the most intimate thing they did together. Michael, casually at ease in his own nakedness, coaxing the same from Alex, until the removal of the prosthetic limb had become almost… sexy.

“You’re much faster at that than I am,” Alex gasped, as the prosthesis was stored safely behind the cooler.

“Eyes on the prize, Manes,” Michael said, efficiently dispensing with Alex’s briefs as well. Then he resumed his explorations, licking along the line of Alex’s hip, pressing his legs open to taste the crease of his thigh. He dragged his tongue over the length of Alex’s cock, his own responding when Alex moaned plaintively. He turned his head and latched his mouth sideways along Alex’s cock, running his lips over it, down and up, and flicked his tongue along the pulsing vein underneath. He was about to apply himself in earnest when Alex tangled a hand in his hair and dragged him up for a kiss. And why not, he could kiss Alex all night. He situated himself between Alex’s legs and hiked the left one around his waist. Alex wrapped an arm around his shoulders and hauled him closer for a hard, biting kiss, capturing Michael’s lower lip between his teeth. Sharp and greedy tonight, sucking forcefully at his mouth and tongue. Their bodies aligned like magnets, settling in to each other’s dips and grooves. Hips locking, chests connecting, and so much skin on skin on skin.

So _right._

Michael sweetened the kiss, pulling back for a shallow brush of lips, achingly slow. He ran his fingers through Alex’s hair, tousling it into sweaty spikes. He flung out his free hand, thinking vaguely of the bottle of lube in his bag, and it smacked against his palm a second later.

“Such a show-off, Guerin,” Alex mumbled into the kiss, and Michael could feel him trying not to smile.

“You know it turns you on, Manes.” He lost himself in Alex’s mouth for a while, rocking his hips slightly but staying focused on what their mouths were doing. He didn’t realize Alex had snagged the lube until he felt a wet, slippery hand wrapping around his cock.

“You’re so fucking hard,” Alex observed, a little breathlessly.

“Kissing you seems to have that effect on me, baby,” he drawled, and Alex’s grip tightened.

“What do you want, Michael?”

_You. All of you._

He dragged his thumb across Alex’s cheek. Alex shifted beneath him, and he inhaled sharply against the jolt of friction. _Everything is going to be okay_ , he thought suddenly. He love, love, _loved_ Alex, with a ferocity that drew him across the universe, through time and space, to this here and now. Lying together in the bed of his truck under the same stars.

“Time’s up,” Alex said, interrupting this celestial train of thought with a firm pinch to his ass. _Ouch._ “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” Michael said fervently.

“Like this, okay?” Alex angled his hips forward and lined them up.

“Hell, yeah.” His heartbeat accelerated. He reclaimed the lube, coating his fingers before pushing two of them inside Alex. They went in easily. There had been mouths and hands and fingers in bed the past few nights, but Michael had felt too drained, too far away, for anything more. There were some things you had to be wholly present for, and he was grateful they’d taken their time resurfacing from the strangeness of what had happened that day. Now he was conscious of nothing but Alex, body undulating under his, muscles fluttering around his fingers as he stretched him open.

“I’m good,” Alex declared, pushing back against three fingers now. “I don’t need anymore, Michael, I’m—”

Michael smirked down at him, enjoying the impatience on his face. “Who says I’m doing it for you?” He didn’t give Alex a chance to answer, sliding down his restless, twitching body to throw Alex’s thighs over his shoulders and replace his fingers with his tongue. He loved doing this, he could do this forever, listening to Alex half-sob his name as he took him apart the filthiest way he knew how until there was nothing left to dismantle—

“ _Michael_!” Alex yelled raggedly and yanked on his hair. When Michael drew away and opened his eyes, he saw Alex glaring at him, a hand gripping the base of his cock to keep from coming. “I’m too close.” He laughed breathlessly, adding, “You’re a fucking menace, Guerin.”

“Uh-huh…” He wiped his chin off on the inside of Alex’s thigh and slithered back up his body. Alex rose to meet him on his swift push in. They paused when he was fully lodged, staring at each other. He caught a glimpse of his face reflected in Alex’s pupils, wide-eyed and wild-haired. Alex tightened his knee over his forearm, wordlessly urging him on. He began to move, harder, like Alex wanted—deep, jerky slams of his hips. Alex’s hands groped, frantic, along his back to his ass to pull him in and in and in…

Michael forced himself to slow down, easing into a gradual, unhurried rhythm.

Alex arched his back with a breathless little shudder. “Michael…”

“I’m not going anywhere, Alex.”

“You gonna move any faster?”

“I’m taking my time… _our_ time…”

He could feel the precise moment when Alex gave himself over to the soft rocking cadence of it.

_Oh._

That was good.

That was very, _very_ good.

“Can you… like this?”

“Yes…” The word left Alex’s mouth like a sigh. “Just need…”

Michael knew exactly what he needed. He hoisted Alex’s hips higher and gave it to him. The forceful slam in—that was the “fucking” part—then the deep rolling grind—when he _made love_ to him—and the sloppy kiss as he withdrew. Again. Again. Until it all blurred together, until _they_ blurred together, two-in-one.

 

*

 

“What’s the answer to the question?” Alex asked, after they’d cleaned up a bit and had some water and nestled down in the blankets.

“Huh?” Michael said. He wasn’t good for much immediately after sex, except lazy kisses and languid touches. “What question?”

“The higher dimension,” Alex reminded him. “When you solved the mystery of the universe…?”

“Mm.” He burrowed into the crook of Alex’s neck, all the warm sleepy nakedness making his eyelids droop.

_The mystery of the universe._

Oh, right.

He sat up on one elbow so he could see Alex’s face. Alex was looking at him intently, bright-eyed, waiting for the answer. “Love,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It’s the only thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends the dimensions of time and space.” He laughed softly, self-conscious. “Sounds stupid, but I’m pretty sure I’ve proven it.”

“Not stupid, perfect,” Alex said, smiling slightly, reaching out to stroke his jaw. Michael leaned into the touch. “All that fancy science I’ll never understand, and now my own personal genius tells me that love is the greatest thing we have.”

“Sounds easy, right?” Alex’s thumb brushed the corner of his mouth; he parted his lips and caught it with his tongue. “I guess that’s why it’s so fucking hard.”

Michael lay awake a few minutes more after Alex fell asleep, gazing up at the stars. He found Arcturus, a bright orange dot in the sky, thirty-seven light-years away. Sirius, even brighter, only eight light-years away. He tugged Alex’s arm tighter around himself, thinking of Max slumbering in the cave, of his mother, of Rosa and Maria and Kyle and Liz, of Isobel, of Alex and how much he loved him, and of the beautiful green planet where he’d been born, spiraling into a giant sun in a far-distant galaxy, vanished forever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

**Author's Note:**

> This story pillages from Interstellar, Bradbury, Ballard, Doctor Who & David Bowie. 
> 
> Previously: SATELLITE'S GONE, HELL AIN'T HALF FULL, WHAT YOU BREAK IS WHAT YOU GET, BOYS KEEP SWINGING, HALLO SPACEBOY. 
> 
> <3


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